Let's face it, you make money when you give people what they want.
But are you guessing what they want ?
I…

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Save Time & Simplify Your Workflow

Correcting mistakes and omissions takes way more time than setting things up correctly in the first place.

Recently I’ve been helping a business transfer their website to another host and it came up that they didn’t know which company their domain name was registered with, where to access & manage the domain or even who’s name it was registered under.

As we sorted it out, the comments went like this …

Groan. What the hell is all this about? We really shouldn’t be in a position where we don’t know who holds the registration of our domain!

Faaaark. This is really getting a bit much. I just did some more digging…So yes, it appears our domain is registered with Google. What could possibly go wrong there?! I didn’t even know they registered domains, but there you go.I have found a variety of old invoices in Xero, our accounting system …

And so on as more was found out.

2 rules-of-thumb

Correcting mistakes and omissions takes way more time than setting things up correctly in the first place.

The faster and easier something is to do, the more likely it will get done.

Here are some BASIC points that might prevent things from going wrong later and will save you a LOT of time and worry if something goes wrong.

Basic setups to save headaches

Keep a master text document or spreadsheet with details of all your main online accounts – the company, login address, usernames and passwords and recovery email address. These would include your domain name registrar, website host, internet service provider and all online service subscriptions.

Print it so that you also have a paper version when there’s a blackout or if your computer dies.

Keep an old-time handwritten address book of phone numbers and email addresses.

Maintain a backup of your computer files that is stored at a different physical address. It can be an online real-time backup like Backblaze or Carbonite. Or it can be an external hard drive that you transport somewhere else regularly.

Use Lastpass or Roboform for your passwords. Though I never store financial ones in the cloud even with encryption.

Run your computers & modems through a UPS ( uninterrupted power supply). They give you an hour or so to complete work when the power fails and prevent damage from lightning and storm surges. CyberPower make some good ones that you can get from https://www.mwave.com.au

Making your online workflow easy

Everything involves tradeoffs. Often it involves balancing how much the software or services allows you to do with how much you have to learn.

on cloud hosting or a virtual private server for better speed (though some shared hosting with the solid-state-drives (SDD) is getting pretty fast too).

GetResponse hooked in for email marketing.

WordPress

To get things done fast with the least amount of effort, you need something that will let you create & maintain pages without a lengthy learning curve, which is most easily done with WordPress. Over the last 5 years, I’ve moved most of our marketing clients onto it – it’s way in front of anything else out there for ease-of-use and WAY less effort.

Landing pages & offers

Marketing is an ongoing action where you make people offers. WordPress is great, but there are often marketing elements ( countdown timers, email form integration and feature blocks ) that are way easier to create and manage with a landing page builder.

My favourite is OptimizePress, which is built for WordPress but you’ll also find email marketing services like GetResponse are also offering landing page builders where the page can be imported onto your website. There are other good ones around as well, like Leadpages and IglooApp.

Website Hosting

Not all hosts are equal and some are too difficult to work with and/or run website too slowly. Lots of small businesses put their sites on shared servers ( where the website shares all the apps and programs with other websites ) because they’re cheap. Sometimes they’re OK if the computer the site is on doesn’t get too crowded with websites.

By far the easiest hosting control panel is cPanel ( that’s the brand name ).

Currently I find that FastComet’s the best hosting ( all tradeoffs considered of course ). Suggested hosting to start off is their shared Speedup Rocket Booster package… https://www.fastcomet.com/speedup-rocketbooster … and if the website needs further speed at some point, the server can be upgraded by the FastComet tech guys.

Email marketing

Email marketing services have been incorporating more and more features from business automation and CRM ( customer relationship management ) tools. Which takes the learning curve up a notch again for most people. I find that GetResponse is doing the best job at providing these advanced features and keeping the learning curve to a minimum.

The most valuable asset of ANY business is their central files of email lists or other contacts – people who have already expressed an interest in your business and who can be contacted any time that work decreases (more about that here).